1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, control method thereof, and storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an image processing apparatus such as an MFP which provides a plurality of functions, that is, copy, scan, print, FAX, and network transmission/reception functions, processing systems of respective functions are unitized by dividing the processing systems by spooling to a storage unit. That is, a copy function is implemented by a combination of scan and print processing systems, a scan transmission function is implemented by a combination of scan and network transmission processing systems, and a PDL print function is implemented by a combination of network reception and print processing systems. In this case, as a processing unit of image data handled by each processing system, a band unit obtained by dividing a page into bands each having a predetermined band height, and a block unit obtained by dividing a page into blocks each having a predetermined block width and height are known in addition to a page unit. Especially, a method of handling image data in block units can reduce a storage capacity required for primary storage in respective processing systems compared to methods of handling image data in page units or band units. Also, the method of handling image data in block units divides a page into square tile units each having an equal block width and height, thus allowing handling of image data without any shape change before and after rotation processing. For example, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2011-61555, in a PDL print mode, image data after rendering processing is divided into tile units, and encoding parameters are set for respective tile units, thus switching encoding processing.
However, the aforementioned related art suffers the following problem. With the related art, an image processing apparatus cannot provide a function of flexibly changing a print performance and image quality to have scalabilities to the user in the PDL print mode. That is, as needs when the user uses the image processing apparatus, the following cases are assumed wherein the user wants to print at a high speed as much as possible even at a low image quality or he or she wants to print with a high image quality as much as possible even at a low speed. However, these needs cannot be met. That is, since the capacity of a storage area upon storing data divided into tile units is fixed due to unitization, it is difficult to flexibly meet such needs.